Populous  (Preview)
Platform: Commodore 64
Gametype: Undefined
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1991 Electronic Arts
Status: No Download, Findability: 2/5

Coding: Frank Hugenroth, André Hugenroth
Graphics: Frank Hugenroth, André Hugenroth, Frank Schlueter
Sound: N/A

64’er had stated that the magazine received a demo-disk which included a demo of a c64-version of the god-sim Populous by Peter Molyneux.

The demo-disk included the first graphics and routines for this game, indicating that the scan shots were in fact real.

The last thing the magazine stated is that they will try to contact the programming team and give them some-sort of legal protection (“Schutzenhilfe”), and follow the development of the game.

It wasn’t known how things went with the game, and if 64’er got hold of the game. It looks unlikely due to nothing being released, but all we have for now is the C64 screenshots from the magazine.

Zeldin informed GTW that the guys who made the early screens, did the game “Boom”. After the unsuccessful launch of “Boom”, they sent Zeldin and his crew all their started projects and said: “Finish it if you want!”. On those disks were the “Populous” graphics, and also the source codes.

Former AWT members should know more about what has happened to the disks. The leading squad of the “Airwolf Team” is nowadays also part of “Protovision”.  Therefore it’s a case of trying to contact people who used to be part of AWT, and even now Protovision. What has happened to the sources of this wonderful preview?

Coder, Frank Hugenroth, got in touch with GTW64 in 2015 and confirmed that it was created more as a technical demo for the C64 and was contributed initially as a contribution to an animation/GFX competition.   However, even though 64’er suggested that they had tried to contact the developers, Frank says they never tried even though they knew the developers.

Frank mentioned that they pitched a potential conversion to EA Germany, but they sadly declined.   In the end, the demo initially created was done just for fun, but has a working grid of 64×64 and can be scrolled.  It’s suggested that after EA’s rejection, they did think about using the technique with another game – but it was never to be.  We hope that Frank may have something of the demo!

Well, one of the AWT members – LightSide came to the rescue of GTW64 and has supplied us with the disk which Frank and Andre originally had sent over.  Which includes the source code.  This includes an interactive title page and a map which can be moved around rather impressively.  There is also a tune separately which was not integrated, and is pretty impressive.

Frank has given full permission also for the source code to be released.  The source code is credited to both Frank and Andre.  It is released under the Creative Commons license Attribution as detailed by Frank:

“This material is licensed under the Creative Commons license Attribution – Noncommercial – Share Alike 4.0 International. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.”

Separate from this version of Populous, we can confirm that the C64 version was in the pipeline!… Paul Hughes had the following to say…

“Its only a tidbit – I’m not sure how far that version of Populous actually went, but when I was in first talks with Pete and Les at Bullfrog about Flood 2 – they asked me (circa 1991) if I’d be interested in doing a 64 conversion of Pete’s Populous (having just left Ocean and having a raft of 64 routines still fresh in my mind).

As I got more and more “into” flood 2 and pushing the Atari ST, the thoughts of doing more 64 work where the furthest from my mind. I don’t think they ever got much further, and just afterwards they did a massive selling Megadrive port of Populous and it all fizzled away.”

So did they get someone else to do the port?… Is this the port?…. More info needed, but a very interesting snippet of information there…

But for now, check out what could have been the real deal had EA Germany signed it up!  A massive shame it never got further, but so glad it has been fully saved!

Contributions: Zeldin, Paul Koller, Paul Hughes, Frank Hugenroth, LightSide


http://www.gamesthatwerent.com/gtw64/populous/
